07 March 2011

I've been following an anti-kink discussion at a radical feminist blog for a post that's been garnering comments for almost two years now. Recent comments there have me wondering if it's not just a lack of empathy that is the problem when certain feminists (usually anti-kink/anti-porn/transphobic radical feminists) refuse to listen to other women and instead keep making straw people of them. Because for a long while, I did think it was just a matter of not being able to empathise with others who are not like them. That could explain their efforts to make sure feminism is not for everyone (counter to bell hooks) but is for certain women, women who they see as enough like them. But based on the comments I read tonight which were horrid, twisted, lurid, sexualised fantasies of mutilation and death (which they assigned to kinky feminists), I just have to wonder if they're not the same as those ministers who are especially found in the US and who stand in their pulpits or on their stages and decry in the same kind of overwhelming detail certain types of sexual activities that you later find they have engaged in. I have to wonder about people who imagine in such extreme details things they claim to detest and stand against. Only, I'll be honest, instead of it being something okay like it often is with ministers such as men having sex with men, when it's things like rape, mutilation, and murder? These people scare me. Because they also sound like the stuff I've heard on true crime documentaries about the activities of serial rapists and serial killers. I don't know about most people, but those are the kinds of thing I hear and then shove out of my mind, not store them to pull out to assign as supposedly what people I oppose want.

Don't get me wrong. I don't have a problem with feminists who don't agree with me. But I want honest disagreement. I want people who don't fantasise about why people do things when there are people doing those things who are saying why they do them (as there have been on the thread I'm talking about) as opponents. I want honest engagement and discussion. I'm not assuming this is going to happen with these people for whatever reasons, but I won't be there any more. I refuse to be exposed to someone else's nightmare fantasy vomited on the screen. It squicks me, it disgusts me, it scares me. And while I've been mostly talking about a specific instance with anti-kink feminists, I'm doing the same with transphobic and other feminists who engage in similar disgusting fantasies. Because that's not discussion, that's not debate, that's just slut shaming, misogyny, and other forms of hate.